Business Relocation Letters: How to Effectively Plan, Write, and Deliver Them

February 24, 2014Chipman Relocations

One of the critical parts of a successful commercial move is the business relocation letter. The letter serves as official notice of the move for customers, vendors, business partners, and anyone else that interacts with your company. Effectively planning, writing, and delivering a business relocation letter can help everything from office moving to industrial moving go as smoothly as possible.

Develop a Plan Early

The first step to writing and delivering an effective business relocation letter is to develop a plan. You may not realize it at first, but even something that seems as simple as a business relocation letter is actually somewhat involved if you want to pull it off effectively.

Develop your plan at least six weeks prior to your move date. That should give you enough time to perform all of the following functions before you distribute your letter.

Deliver your business relocation letter three weeks prior to your move date. Three weeks’ notice should be plenty of time for customers, vendors, and other individuals and organizations that your share business relationships with to note the change of address and update their records.

Once you’ve figured out the calendar dates you can start building your mailing list.

Build Your Mailing List(s)

The first component of your plan should be to build your mailing list or lists. After all, you’re going to want to make sure everyone who needs to know about your commercial move is adequately informed. To do that, you’ll need to determine who to contact and how to contact them, whether through postal mail, email, or both.

Determine Who to Contact

Companies usually interact with several different kinds of individuals and organizations, including customers, vendors, and business partners. When you’re planning on moving your business you may want to consider crafting a business relocation letter for each target audience.

For example, you may want to let your customers know why you’re moving your business. If you’re moving your business so you can have a bigger warehouse for inventory or a more central location for retail shoppers, your customers may benefit from knowing the details. This information can also be used to deliver a subtle brand message about improving your ability to serve them more quickly or conveniently.

Or you may want to let vendors and business partners know that you’re moving for positive reasons, to assuage any assumptions that you’re moving locations to save a buck because things are tight. “Business is so good that we’re expanding and moving our location to accommodate our growth” is a simple message that answers questions and delivers positive reinforcement.

Ultimately, whether you craft a separate message for each target audience, and what messaging you might want to include, boils down to several factors, including time and whether you think something like that is even necessary. Many companies simply craft one letter and mail it to everyone they need to contact. If that’s the best plan for you, do it.

Determine How to Contact Them

The next step is determining how you’re going to contact the individuals and organizations on your mailing list. The options for your business relocation letter are postal mail and email.

You’re also going to want to reach out to people on your website and through social media, depending on how you engage folks, but we’ll cross that bridge later.

Gather All Your Current and Future Contact Information

Grab a sheet of paper and write down all of your company’s current and future contact information:

Street address

Mailing address, if a PO Box or somehow different from street address

Phone number(s)

Fax number(s)

Email address(es)

Website URL

Social media accounts

Once you determine how you’re going to contact your mailing list(s) and gather all your company’s contact information, you’re ready to sit down and start writing your business relocation letter.

Start Writing Your Letter

When you write your business relocation letter, make sure you do two things:

Include all your contact information, even if it’s not changing

Keep it short

Contact information is valuable, so make sure those on your mailing list have all of it. Even if one or more pieces of your information won’t change, such as may be the case in an on-site campus move, you should still include it in your business relocation letter. That way folks on your mailing list can choose to update any holes they have regarding you contact information. And you may end up enabling someone to reach out to you in a way they hadn’t tried before, like through social media.

And make sure you’re concise. Your readers need to get the pertinent information, along with any messaging, quickly and clearly.

How to Construct Your Business Relocation Letter

When writing your letter, include the following items, in order:

Company name and current mailing information

Salutation

Introductory paragraph, including any downtime and closure/re-open dates due to moving

Follow-up paragraph, including any changes in service due to moving

New contact information that will take effect after the move

Current contact information that will not change

Closing paragraph

Signature

Deliver Your Business Relocation Letter

After you write your business relocation letter, make sure you mail or email it three weeks before your move date.

Some businesses have the capability to handle the production, postage, and mailing of the letters (or the email production and blast) themselves. If not, there are other companies that can handle the entire process for you.

Syndicate Your Business Relocation Letter

When you mail your business relocation letter, make sure to syndicate the information if doing so could be beneficial. Syndication means posting information from the letter on your website and using whatever social media channels you have to announce the move and start a conversation or drive traffic back to your website, where they can read about the move in more detail.

Syndicating your letter will maximize your chances of reaching customers or others that may not have been on your mailing list and maybe even generate some buzz or conversation about your business and its pending move. Just make sure that if you start a conversation about your move on your website or social media that you participate in the conversation.

Syndication is ideal for some companies and overkill for others. It depends on your business and how you engage customers, vendors, and business partners. If you don’t have the time, resources, or need, you can avoid this step entirely.

Sample Business Relocation Letter

Here’s a sample business relocation letter that takes into account everything we’ve talked about. It’s just an example, so feel free to use it as a template that you can customize for your own letter:

Company Name
[Current Street Address][Current City, Current State] [Current ZIP]

Dear [Firstname Lastname/Organization],

Business is so good that we’re expanding and moving our location to accommodate our growth. We will close our office Friday, April 4, 2014 at 5:30 p.m. to begin the moving process and will re-open at our new location Monday, April 7 at 8:30 a.m.

Our business, including website, email, and telephones, will be fully operational during the moving process and you will not experience any changes or delays in service, production, or shipping during that time.

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